Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.
The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them.
I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen’s work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.
Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.
Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
The inventor knows HOW to borrow.
Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden.
When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, “one that expects no liberation from liberation.
The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.
Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.
Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.
Infinite Jest’ is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it.
Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.
Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.
Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.
Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes.
At eighty-four, I can only write the way I go on teaching, personally and passionately.
You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.
Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, “tuned the English tongue.
A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.